Follow the Lady
by Robin4
Summary: Rumplestiltskin didn't switch the dagger on Belle - he switched it on Regina. It's the only useful trick he learned from his useless father, and Regina never even touched the real thing back in the barn. Spoilers for 3x20 "Kansas" - An attempt to explain the reasons for his lies, and why Rumplestiltskin feels he can't trust any of them.


Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. No profit's being made.

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**Follow ****the Lady**

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He's a monster to be stopped. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised that they seem him that way, but still it burns. Rumplestiltskin sacrificed his life to save these people. He went with them to Neverland, and he thought he earned their trust there. They depended upon _him _to stop Pan, to tell Regina how to reverse her own curse, and in the end, he sacrificed everything to give Regina a chance to do the right thing. Someone should have reminded that he didn't have to do that, that he has a nasty habit of surviving, and _Pan wasn't going to kill Rumplestiltskin_. Oh, no. He would have lived, but he chose to give that up—to spend eternity in the Vault of the Dark One with only his predecessors and endless darkness for company. But he is not surprised that they still view him as a monster who needs to be controlled, only stung.

_Follow the Lady_. The moment the dagger hits the ground, it's out of Zelena's control. It's _his _dagger once more, and he uses the only useful trick his father ever taught him to tear everyone's eyes away from it. While they watch Zelena dragged across the floor, yelping in surprise, while they're focused on his showy attempt at revenge, he summons the dagger and leaves a fake in its place. The replacement is slightly different—his name is on the opposite side—but structurally, the two daggers are identical. This one can't control him, but when Regina grabs it and shouts _"Stop!" _he pretends it can.

He wants to see what will happen. Rumplestiltskin wants to know if he can _trust _these people, these heroes, the ones who cursed them back to Storybrooke just to save a child—a selfish if understandable move. He wants to know if they even care about his freedom, of if they just want to stop him. When Regina picks up the fake, he thinks he is relieved. Regina knows him better than any of these hero types, and Regina understands vengeance.

The fact that he let her stop him from killing Zelena does not mean he doesn't plan to. Zelena orchestrated his son's death, gloated about it, and tortured him by making him feel every shovelful of dirt that was dropped on Baelfire's grave. She locked him in a cage and enslaved him—Rumplestiltskin is not going to let her live. He promised Bae that he would avenge him, that he would _stop _Zelena, and he will. But he's an expert at manipulation, and moreover, he wants to know why Regina would deny him this, so he wheels on her in fury. If she wants to play the hero, fine. She wants to talk about how little vengeance has gained either of them, fine. He's not looking for gain. Rumplestiltskin is the Dark One, and if nothing else, he cannot permit this to have happened. Not without consequences.

And then Regina keeps the fake, thinking she's keeping the real dagger. She might as well have stabbed him with it for the message that it communicates: _We don't trust you._ Something in him breaks, because Regina is the one out of the group he was so sure would not deny him his freedom. Perhaps the others might be so misguided as to think they were serving the 'greater good' by holding onto the dagger, but Regina understands being trapped. He could live with her stopping him, but he can't live with this. In that moment, he hates them all.

So he walks away, goes to the shop. Regina says something about going there and how she'll send Belle, but he ignores her. Rumplestiltskin needs a few minutes to gather himself, to swallow the sad truth: he had thought these people were his allies. He had helped them—without demanding a damn thing—and here they were, treating him like he was less than human._ But of course you aren't human, dearie. You're the Dark One, _a voice inside him says. _You're not one of them_. One of the things that had kept him sane these last few months was the knowledge that Zelena didn't comprehend how he had come to an understanding with these people. That they knew he didn't want to kill any of them, that they knew he was more than the sum of his curse.

Apparently he was wrong, and that hurts more than he thought it would.

Then, suddenly, there is Belle, and the gaping wounds in his soul start to close a little bit. He can hold her and feel safe and whole, and perhaps his battered psyche can mend a little. She's fought so hard for him so many times, and he has never loved her more than he does now. When her arms wrap around him, he feels like he has come home, and he feels _alive _for the first time since that disastrous night at the Vault.

And then the surprise comes: Regina gave Belle the fake. It's a coward's move—he knows these kinds of maneuvers from vast amounts of experience. Belle tells him that it was Regina's way of making amends with her (long overdue amends, he knows), but it isn't Belle's dagger. It isn't her freedom. Belle's not the one who was locked in a cage for a year, whose son was murdered and who suffered torture at Zelena's hands. Belle's just the one they prefer to trust. They want _Belle _to do their dirty work for them, they want _Belle _to control him so that they don't have to feel guilty. They think his love for Belle is so strong that he'll accept this gracefully, that he'll be happy being a slave just because he loves her.

Belle gives him the fake, and his broken heart heals, just a little. He doesn't deserve her, because she doesn't know this is a fake dagger. She just believes she's giving him his freedom back, and he is utterly floored by this demonstration of love and trust. Belle hands him his soul and doesn't even demand the promise she asks for (though the Dark One in his mind whispers that she _couldn't _demand it, not when the real dagger is safe in his possession). He was wrong before. He loves her even more now for what she thinks she is doing, and although Rumplestiltskin meant to tell her that he had the real dagger, that he was truly free, he cannot ruin this moment by showing her that her utterly selfless choice offer wasn't needed at all.

_Regina thinks she gave Belle the dagger. Regina and the others think I need to be controlled. _Even Belle's warmth cannot take away the cold feeling behind that knowledge.

So he does the only thing he can think to do. The only thing that will keep Belle safe and him free. He gives her back the fake, promising himself that he'll make this right later. He never _says _it's the real dagger—a play on words that might just infuriate Belle later—and instead talks about how he can never give her something equal to what she has given him. Belle should probably know him well enough to catch the difference, to notice that he never promises not to kill Zelena, even though he should have to, because she's holding what she thinks is the real dagger and he would have no choice. He's not quite lying to her, which is better than an outright falsehood, although his heart clenches at the knowledge that Belle might not see it this way.

The next words, however, surprise him as much as they do her, even if he'd been thinking of little else since waking up from his madness and realizing his son was dead. He asks her to marry him, and she says yes.

Rumplestiltskin loves Belle more than anything, and she is all he has left in the world. Handing her the fake _isn't _smoke and mirrors, not to him. He's giving her a symbol of his blackened soul, right there in her hands, trusting her to tread gently. He tells himself that he'll probably replace it with the real dagger later, but for now he needs that dagger for one last thing. Grief, love, joy, and guilt war for control of his emotions when Belle wraps her arms around him, crying with joy. He loves her and he wants to marry her, but a lie of omission is still a lie. _Fix it later, _the darkness in him whispers. There are things he must do.

"Belle has a fake," he tells Zelena as she stares at him in surprise. Really, the woman who he seduced for a chance at the dagger (a ridiculously easy seduction Zelena should have seen through, for his heart was never hers for the taking) should not be so shocked. She has known since the very beginning that if that dagger left her control in his presence, he would take it. He would not hesitate. He went along with Regina's 'command' because he could kill Zelena at any time, and that time is now.

So he smiles and he mocks her. He's fooled them _all_, and if Belle is collateral damage, he'll explain it to her later. She'll understand, he prays, why he's terrified of being controlled and how broken he feels every time he remembers that his _allies _think he needs controlling. That he's somehow less than a human because of his curse, and that means he can't be trusted. Despite the fact that they've trusted Rumplestiltskin a hundred times to get them out of a hundred bad situations, always knowing he'd keep his word. Not now, though. Now they only think he's a monster who needs to be controlled. Caged. Stopped.

"Rumplestiltskin never breaks a deal," he tells Zelena after he transports himself into her cell, enjoying her fear more than a little. _The shoe is on the other foot now, isn't it, dearie?_ he thinks. But it's the words he says that matter, because it's the mantra he's lived his life by since the day he let his boy go, the only deal he ever broke. And this promise, made to his dying son and to himself, is one he could never break.

Damn the consequences.

He kills Zelena without a flicker of regret. The heroes will hate it, maybe even hate him, but what does he care? If Regina truly wanted her sister alive, she should have tried to make a deal with him, should have offered him (what she thought was) the dagger in exchange for Zelena's life. Maybe he would have even taken that deal. Maybe he would even have kept it, because it might have meant that the heroes saw him as more than a monster to be enslaved.

But they don't, and he no longer cares what they think of him. Belle is the only one who matters. He left the fake there for Regina (or one of them) to find to see who he could trust. The answer is depressingly simple: Belle. And only Belle.

So he heads home to the woman he loves, knowing he'll have to explain what he has done. Rumplestiltskin prays she'll understand, prays she'll help him reassemble the shattered pieces of his soul when she does so. He can begin to grieve now that his son's murderer is dead, now that he's free. Part of him actually—shockingly—_wants _to give the real dagger to Belle, because he trusts her and he loves her, but part of him shies away from that idea in terror. And his more logical mind knows that having the dagger would only endanger Belle still further. Oh, the heroes won't take it from her, but someone else would. The list of people who would like to control the Dark One is only ever growing.

He has to tell her. She deserves to know. The only question is how.

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_**Author's Note**__: If you watch "Kansas" carefully, you'll see that the dagger Regina picks up has Rumplestiltskin's name on the wrong side. The entire time Regina holds it, it's a 'right handed' dagger, where the name faces outwards when the holder has it in their right hand. Later, when Rumplestiltskin has the dagger before he kills Zelena, it's clearly the 'left handed' dagger, the one used in previous episodes to control him._

_This fic is based on my theory of what's actually going on here at the end of Season 3. Rumplestiltskin's always been a manipulator, and why go for revenge instead of the dagger? I can't see any reason he would have gone after Zelena before retrieving the key to his own freedom, because once he had the dagger, no one could stop him._


End file.
